By lunchtime on Day 3, at a slow-but-steady one mile per hour, I had burned about 300 calories without noticing. When I finished a long phone interview, I was thirsty, a little sweaty and downright cheery, feeling the slight mood elevation that comes from a walk through the park.

But when an editor asked for the top of my story, I spent half an hour straining to form a sentence. Slowing down didn’t help.

“You know I need all of your energy,” my brain seemed to be saying, “if you want this to be good.”

My obsession with treadmill desks began a few years ago, when I read of the mounting research linking sitting to elevated disease risk and early death as I was glued to my chair writing a long article about cancer research.

Like about three-quarters of Americans, I had always performed large parts of my job sitting down. I walk three miles to work each morning and (sometimes) ride my bike up hills on weekends. But regular exercise, the research showed, did not offset the perils of sitting for several hours a day. “Sitting Is the New Smoking — Even for Runners,” warned Runner’s World magazine.

Shaving a few hours of sitting off your total daily sitting time appeared to help. In one study, women ages 50 to 74 who sat six or more hours a day died at a rate 34 percent higher than those who sat for three hours or less. Still, any sitting looked to be pretty bad: A study of rats found that when their leg muscles were disengaged, they simply stopped producing a key molecule the body needs to process fats.

So I decided to work standing up: I raised the height of my laptop by setting it on a pile of books. But that proved uncomfortable, and I figured that if I was going to stand, I might as well be walking — the way everyone else on the Internet suddenly seemed to be.

First commercialized in 2007, treadmill desks, which consist of an adjustable-height desk surface atop a treadmill optimized for use at slow speeds, were clearly gaining ground. Lawyers, computer programmers, college professors and no shortage of writers, I noticed, were blogging their praises and posting their workday mileage.

“On the road away from tread desk sitting in long train/car rides,” Rebecca Skloot, an author, tweeted last year to A. J. Jacobs, who wrote about the virtues of his tread desk from his tread desk in his own latest book. “The horror!”

As bad as it seemed to have my life cut short by job-related sitting, the idea that others with the right technology could escape the same fate made it worse. Still, I hesitated. Unlike many tread-desk evangelists, I don’t work at home. Nor is The New York Times newsroom one of those trendy open spaces like the Silicon Valley companies that offer tread desks along with free back massages and healthful snacks. I would have to use the contraption in my 6foot-by-6-foot cubicle. Would it disturb my neighbors? Would I be mocked? Would I even be allowed to set it up? What if I hated it, after all that?

As an experiment, I ordered one for home. The low hum of its motor sounded like a vacuum cleaner on the hardwood floors of our Upper West Side apartment, where it took up roughly two-thirds of any room, all of which are already fully occupied.

I sent it back without having put it through its paces.

Then, by happy coincidence, I received an email from the editors of this section, asking for contributions on personal health technology. I had been working for months, mostly seated, on a project about genetically modified food. With what was left of my atrophied leg muscles, I jumped to volunteer. For the sake of the story, I explained, I would need to — temporarily — at least install a treadmill at my desk.

It took just a few minutes to remove my regular desk to make room for the $4,500 loaner from Steelcase. (LifeSpan, Ergotron, TreadDesk and others also make popular models, starting around $1,000). Other than it moving under my feet, it’s just your basic desk with a console that displays my distance, time and calories burned. There is a start button and a stop button, one to adjust the speed and another the height. There was even enough space in my allotted cube for my chair and a small table so I could sit and write.

After a few false starts, I began to learn to adjust my speed to the task at hand. Sometimes I was walking too fast to concentrate, but sometimes a slow pace seemed to be a drag on my work. So when I felt my body getting in the way of my brain, I just pushed the treadmill’s up or down buttons.

When it comes to synthesizing a lot of information into a coherent article, the hardest part of my job, I still have the powerful urge to sit. And I pause when editors come by to talk, because it seems rude to burn calories while they stand still. But ideal email-writing speeds range from half a mile to 1.5 miles per hour, and the perfect balance for phone interviews is closer to two miles per hour. Not all of my colleagues share my tread-desk enthusiasm. “I have enough trouble doing my job as it is,” a Metro reporter told me. Others saw it as a multitasking slippery slope. One hums the marching song of the flying monkeys from “Wizard of Oz” when he passes by, roughly in time with my own footfalls.

On the other hand, it is sometimes hard to get the managing editor off my treadmill so I can get some work done. He feels it should go faster and include an incline feature. Many have exclaimed about the weight-loss prospects. (One hundred calories per hour on average adds up.) And there has been a constant stream of visitors, drawn by the bobbing of my head above the line of cubicle walls, asking for a demonstration.

As my second week drew to a close, I was logging five-mile days. It seemed clear that I was reaping some of the health benefits of the treadmill desk.

But as I started to write this — sitting down — I wondered whether I had missed out on something almost as important that it might offer.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, I learned, had found that children and young adults improved cognitive performance when walking at their preferred speed.

Could walking while writing actually improve my stories, as well as my health? And could I retrain my brain to do it? Could those punchy but profound endings that I invariably conceive when I’m out exercising but can’t remember when I’m in front of the screen be channeled by the tread desk?

I might just have to keep it for a while to find out.

A version of this article appears in print on 03/11/2014, on page D10 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Finding the Right Pace on a Treadmill Desk.